Herdman and the Twenty-Fifth Man: When Makassar Pays for a Jakarta Dream

On 22 September 2026, in Makassar, a club media officer named Sulaiman Abdul Karim told reporters that Rizky Eka Pratama had already departed for Jakarta. There was no press conference. There was no statement from the federation. There was only a short sentence, a flight, and a hotel corridor in the capital waiting for one more shirt.

Three days earlier, a defender named Shayne Pattynama had left Persija Jakarta in the same direction. And eighteen days before that, the Indonesian national team had twenty-three players.

I have watched many national-team call-ups across thirty-five years in this trade. At fifty-one, I have learned something I refused to believe when I was young: when a coach keeps adding bodies in the final days, it usually says less about the players being called than about the players he does not yet trust. A squad does not naturally swell. It swells because something inside the coach's head is contracting.

And across four days, John Herdman did exactly that.

FOUR DAYS, TWO NAMES, ONE SILENCE

Let us lay out the timeline properly, because the timeline is the real protagonist here.

On 18 September 2026, Indonesia had twenty-three players. On 20 September, Shayne Pattynama of Persija Jakarta was added. On 22 September, Rizky Eka Pratama of PSM Makassar followed. The count stopped at twenty-five.

The first thing worth noting: the two late additions do not play in the same line. Pattynama is a defender. Rizky Eka is a left winger. If Herdman were worried about one specific position running thin, he would have called one player in that exact position. Expanding across two different lines — one defensive, one attacking — looks like broad-spectrum insurance rather than a narrow concern.

The second thing: both names come from the two largest and most storied clubs in Indonesian football. Persija Jakarta and PSM Makassar. This is the classic behaviour of a pipeline flowing from the top of the domestic pyramid into the national team. No surprises, no experiments, no calls from the lower divisions. Herdman was not hunting for treasure. He was collecting verified stock.

The third thing, and the most important one: PSSI said nothing. No official announcement about the possibility of players being cut. The squad reached twenty-five, and the federation left that vacuum for the press to fill.

I learned to read silences like this in the summer of 2026, when Liverpool won the Premier League for the first time in thirty years and nobody was allowed into the streets to celebrate. On the night of 25 June that year, I drove around the city and watched people stand in their doorways, lighting little lamps on their front steps and singing through phone speakers. There was no match to commentate. There was only absence, and that absence became a character with a voice of its own. A silence in sport is never neutral; it is a loudspeaker waiting for someone to flip the switch.

For Indonesia, that switch is named Singapore. In the same report, it was noted that Singapore had also registered twenty-five players. A harmless comparison, on the surface. But it has a clear function: it pre-empts the argument that Herdman is hoarding players. If your direct rival is doing the same, then twenty-five is a regional norm rather than one man's mess.

That is a very graceful way of anchoring expectations. It is also a sign that the reporter understood what readers would wonder before they wondered it.

WHO HE IS, AND WHY THE LEFT FLANK

On Rizky Eka Pratama, we have exactly two pieces of data. First: he started all three of PSM Makassar's opening matches in the 2026/2027 Super League. Second: in a 3-3 draw, he provided one assist.

Two data points. The sample is far too small to conclude anything about his ceiling. But it is enough to conclude a few things about how Herdman decides.

A player who starts all three opening fixtures is a player in real competitive form, not form on paper. He has played actual football, under actual pressure, against actual defenders, in a league running in parallel with the national-team campaign. This is a selection driven by form plus familiarity, not by novelty.

And the familiarity has a paper trail. This is not Rizky Eka's first call-up under Herdman. He has worn the national shirt under the Englishman before, and has featured against Vietnam and Singapore in the 2026 AFF Cup. For a player like that, the integration cost is close to zero. He does not need three sessions to learn how his teammates move. He already knows.

At the elite level, the most expensive commodity is not talent; it is the time required for talent to understand a system. Herdman is buying time by calling familiar names.

But there is something the report does not say, and I have to be blunt that it does not say it: there is no detail whatsoever about Indonesia's tactical system. No formation, no PPDA, no xG, no description of the left winger's specific role in the team's operation. We know the position being reinforced. We do not know how it will be used.

So the only tactical conclusion I am willing to offer, once every speculation has been struck out, is this: this is a personnel move, not a system move. Herdman is thickening the wide attacking department. He is not changing Indonesia's style. Anyone telling you this call-up signals a tactical revolution is selling you something they themselves cannot see.

There is one smaller detail worth pausing on. This season, Rizky Eka carries two calendars at once: the Super League with PSM and the national-team campaign. Both fall within the same month. That is the kind of load nobody puts in a statistics table, but it sits in a player's calf, and it will show up somewhere — either in a sprint that falls half a metre short, or in a training session he asks to leave early.

SQUAD DEPTH: GENEROSITY, OR ANXIETY IN MAKE-UP

In English, the phrase "squad depth" sounds soothing. It evokes a full well, ready to be drawn from at any moment. In professional reality, depth is a far less comfortable thing: it is evidence that the coach has not yet dared to lock his starting eleven.

Look at how Herdman operates. He does not cut. He adds. On 18 September, twenty-three. On 20 September, one more. On 22 September, another. Four days, three timestamps, and the direction is always upward.

A coach who already has his team in his head does the opposite. He names a wide group, trims it down, then locks it. Herdman reverses the process: he starts from a tidy twenty-three, then widens. That means that on 18 September he believed he had enough. And by 22 September, he had changed his mind.

There are two explanations for that change of mind, and they lead to very different conclusions.

The first: there are unreported injuries or fitness questions. This is the most logical hypothesis, because a coach rarely wakes up feeling the need for extra bodies when everything is calm. But it must be said plainly: there is no injury report anywhere in this material. So this is inference, not fact.

The second: Herdman is maximising his registration pool before a compulsory deadline. In regional football, teams often register a wide preliminary list and later trim it to the official matchday number. If that is the case, twenty-five is not the final squad. It is a reservoir.

And this is where I want you to stop, because most analysis will skate past it: we are talking about twenty-five people, but possibly only a fraction of them will dress for any given match. If a shorter matchday list exists, then saying "Indonesia has twenty-five players" overstates the number who can actually take the field. The boundary between "called up" and "selected to play" is a boundary that short news items always blur.

I have seen this repeat too often to be surprised. A twenty-five-man squad is rarely a statement of strength; it is a statement of uncertainty organised neatly.

THE COST SITS IN MAKASSAR

This is the part nobody wants to write, because it does not photograph well.

Rizky Eka Pratama is a key player for PSM Makassar. He started all three of the club's opening matches of the new season. And now he is leaving, in the middle of the 2026/2027 Super League's opening rounds, to serve the national team.

Nobody pays PSM for that.

In English, this is called a club-versus-country conflict. But that phrase is too polite. It conceals the real nature of the problem, which is a transfer of risk from one party to another. The club keeps the downside. The national team captures the upside. The player is an appreciating asset belonging to the club, and that asset is being exposed on a field that does not belong to the club, at the most important moment of the season.

If you are a European club, you can absorb this shock. You have twenty-five comparable players, a medical department with fifteen specialists, insurance contracts. In Southeast Asia, margins are thinner, squads are thinner, and resilience is thinner. Losing a starting left winger across the first three rounds of the season is not a fixture annoyance. It can be several points, and several points can be a league position, and a league position can be next year's broadcast money.

This is why I am always slow with tributes to the "domestic-league-to-national-team pipeline". I understand why people like it. It sounds developmental, professional, very European. But a pipeline does not flow both ways. It flows from the small club to the great glory, and the cost stays at the source.

And here I must add one market note, while lowering my confidence accordingly: if Rizky Eka performs well in the regional tournament, his value rises. If his value rises, his appeal to clubs outside Indonesia rises with it. PSM may be simultaneously nurturing an asset and pushing it beyond its own reach. The transfer market does not sell players; it sells dreams priced in fear. And in young leagues, the greatest fear is not losing a match — it is losing a player to a bigger league without having prepared his replacement in time.

I do not have Rizky Eka's age, transfer fee, or contract length. So this is a directional read, not a forecast. But the age-value curve — market value typically rising through the early and mid-twenties and declining after peak age — tilts me toward this: a young player starting regularly for a big club, already capped at a regional tournament, tends to sit in the ascending stretch of that curve. If so, the opportunity cost PSM is paying is not small.

THE CONTRARIAN ANGLE: WHAT WE ARE READING WRONG

Now I want to say what I actually think, having let this story sit overnight — a habit I learned after too many times rushing to judgement on instinct.

Most analysis of this call-up will follow a familiar path. It will say Herdman is building depth. It will praise Indonesian football for assembling a deep squad for the regional stage. It will treat Rizky Eka's call-up as a reward for form, a signal that the domestic league is producing talent of sufficient standard.

I do not object to those conclusions. I simply think they are looking at the lit part of the photograph.

There is a blind spot sitting inside the number twenty-five itself. A squad that swells before a tournament is not a sign of abundance; it is usually a sign of a question without an answer. And in this particular case, the unanswered question has a very clear shape: Herdman has not settled his left flank.

Had he an established starting left winger, he would not need another left winger. He only adds bodies when a position is contested, or when a position has an undisclosed problem. In either case, that is good news for Rizky Eka at the level of personal opportunity, and worrying news at the level of the system.

A coach with a stable system does not need twenty-five men for a regional tournament. He needs twenty-three or twenty-four and a spine everyone knows. Widening to twenty-five suggests that spine is negotiating with itself.

There is a second blind spot, and this one belongs to the trade of reporting rather than to football. In the source material, two names appear for the same 2026 window: one is the "FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026", the other is the "AFF Cup 2026" — while the matches against Vietnam and Singapore are recorded as having taken place in the latter. Two names for one tournament, or two tournaments in one year, or a confusion baked into the reporting process. I do not know the answer. But I know this: when the tournament's own name is unresolved, every conclusion about what the squad list means should be held in provisional form.

A naming error does not falsify an event. But it blurs the line between what a reporter knows and what a reporter guesses — and that line is the only thing keeping this profession upright.

The third blind spot is source structure. The decisive fact in the entire story — that the player has departed for Jakarta — comes from a single source: a club media officer. That is a good source for the club's action. It is not an authoritative source for registration status at federation level. PSSI is silent. There is no official confirmation of whether the player is eligible for registration, or whether twenty-five sits inside the competition's permitted cap.

That a club media officer, rather than a federation official, is the voice for an event concerning the national team tells a story about communication order. It shows the news flowed out of the club first, and the federation was not ready to speak. In my trade, that is the signature of a story built from a tip, not from a press release.

That does not make the story false. It only means we are reading one half of a conversation.

WHAT REMAINS

I no longer chase the ball the way Mbappé does, but I have learned to chase its story. And this story, at its deepest layer, is not about a young player earning a call-up. It is about a system asking itself who it is.

A national team calling up two players from its two biggest clubs within four days is a national team searching for certainty in the most familiar places. A club letting its key player leave mid-season is a club placing national pride above its own interest. And a federation saying nothing about who will be cut is a federation that has not yet decided what it wants.

Football is the only place where adults are allowed to weep like children without explanation. But before the tears, there is always a silence — the silence before someone dares to lock the list of their own life.

Herdman will lock his. PSM will carry on without its left flank. Rizky Eka will walk into a hotel corridor in Jakarta not knowing whether he will play. And in Makassar, a media officer will pick up the phone again, call a colleague, and speak about a boy the club gave away without having asked the price.

Every season that passes is a book closing; careful readers find themselves inside it. I read this one and found something achingly familiar: in football, we always praise the called-up, and almost never ask who paid for the call.